


a journey i just don't have a map for

by 40millionyears



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Dialogue Heavy, F/M, Gen, Season/Series 02, Soulmates, Timeline What Timeline, abusing narrative structure like it's going out of fashion, yeah mike schur i have a lot of questions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-03-27 10:26:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13878933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/40millionyears/pseuds/40millionyears
Summary: she's never heard a love story like this one (she won't get to remember it anyway).eleanor and chidi, on earth and somewhere else.





	a journey i just don't have a map for

**Author's Note:**

> _"all her friends, they've been tried for treason  
>  and crimes that were never defined  
> she's saying, love is like a barren place  
> and reaching out for human faith is  
> like a journey I just don't have a map for"_
> 
> savage garden's "to the moon and back" is eleanor to a t and I will fight you on that. 
> 
> playing fast and loose with punctuation, grammar, and time as a linear concept.

_It's not that Eleanor doesn't want to be a Good Person, whatever that means. It's not like her lifelong dream was to be the girl who buckled a scarecrow stolen from a county fair into her passenger seat to use the carpool lane, and then tried to flash the cop who pulled her over to get out of a ticket._  
  
_And then tried to sell the scarecrow back to the fair._  
  
_After keeping its scarf._  
  
_But she wants it in that abstract, undefined way, the way she wants to care about Syria and stop sticking her gum on the underside of tables and maybe run a half marathon one day, one of those cancer ones. Being a Good Person means having to constantly think about being a Good Person, and worry about doing Good Things, and… well, being an asshole is easy, and requires very little forethought, and comes with an ample chaser of Lonely Girl Margarita Mix.  
  
__She’s really a lot more self-aware than people give her credit for. (Given that this means that she’s actually just making an active choice to be an asshole, this might not be a positive trait.)  
  
__This is all to say that, when Michael tells her she's in the Good Place, she figures out pretty damn quickly that someone's made a giant forking mistake.  
  
_

* * *

  
“I’m sorry, who are you?” the man – _Chidi,_ she reminds herself, listening to people when they introduce themselves is a Good Thing to do – asks.  
  
She takes the seat opposite the desk, which, okay, he hadn’t actually invited her to do but she figures she’s already a little past the point of having been invited to do anything in this situation. “My name is Eleanor Shellstrop.” She holds out her hand to shake his, by way of proper introduction. It's only polite.   
  
“And you’re not a student?”  
  
“Not… exactly, no,” she says. “This is going to sound crazy, trust me when I say I know that, but just hear me out.”  
  
She hesitates, just in case he does not in fact care to hear her out, but he relaxes back into his chair a little and waits for her to continue.  
  
“About a year ago I was almost crushed to death by an avalanche of shopping carts, the context doesn’t matter, and I had that moment where you see your life, you know? And the truth is, I was a pretty crummy person. So I tried to stop being a crummy person, but it turns out it’s actually really forking hard to do that on your own.”  
  
“Did you- did you just say forking?”  
  
“Oh, right, sorry. Part of the “don’t be a crummy person” thing is trying not to swear. Cause, you know, it _might_ be my fault that my neighbour’s kid called her kindergarten teacher a, um, forking deckbag for trying to make her lay down at nap time.”  
  
His eyebrows shoot up into his hairline - she probably didn't need to add the exaggerated air quotes for him to get her meaning - but she presses on.  
  
“Anyhow, long story short, I told a magical guardian angel bartender all my problems about being a good person and he said… well, a bunch of stuff, he was _really_ chatty, but he said, “the real question, Eleanor, is what do we owe to each other?” A question which not only did I manage to remember when I woke up with a very un-magical hangover the next morning, but I also Googled. And your talk for the Cas… Cas…ey Affleck? No, he’s a perv. Your long nerdy talk video came up, so I watched it.”  
  
He pushes back from the desk, as though to stand, and his face is furrowed. “Okay, I’m sorry, Miss, uh… Eleanor? But I think that you might be in the wrong _—_ "  
  
“Okay, I’m talking a lot, I’m know, I’m sorry. I just… I want to be a better person. I want to do good things. I do. I just… need someone to show me the ropes. And you seemed to be the expert in better people and good things, and I promise I will be, like, a thousand percent more invested than the hungover freshmen who show up because nobody warned them about attendance credits. So… what do you say? Let me be your ethical charity case?”  
  
The look on his face – perplexed and compassionate and also like he’s slightly in pain, all at once – suddenly feels so familiar to her, somehow. She's struck with the immediate, complete conviction that she's seen that look directed at her before, dozens of times, in response to any number of similarly inane ideas she's had in her life; and then just as suddenly, the feeling passes, and he's a stranger again. It’s like two tiny pieces of a much bigger, murkier puzzle are trying to fit themselves together in a little corner of her brain.  
  
“You… you flew halfway around the world because you watched my lecture because a bartender told you to? And you want me to teach you ethics?”  
  
She shrugs, managing an air of nonchalant bravado that she prays doesn’t betray the desperate churning in her stomach and the fluttering hope of her heartbeat. “Pretty much, yup.”  
  
“And, uh, how long are you staying?”  
  
“Well, see, that’s a funny story. I only bought a one way ticket. Took a real leap of faith kind of thing here.”  
  
There’s a long silence where she’s not entirely sure he’s not going to call campus security on her.  
  
“Okay.” Finally, simply, straightforwardly. “Yes.”  
  
“Becau–.“ She pauses mid-word, her mouth hanging open with the pleading, poignant rebuttal that she’d prepared for his denial ready to tumble out. She’d expected some resistance, to have to convince him that she was worth it. Maybe even to have to flirt a little, depending on what kind of dude he’d turned out to be in real life. “Wait, what?”  
  
The corner of his mouth tugs up a little. “Kant wrote that it’s our duty to better ourselves. And you seem… very earnest and genuine about doing that, if not a little insane. So if that really is what you’re trying to do, the right thing for me to do is to help you.”  
  
He’s not kidding. He’s not going to have her forcibly removed from his office for being stalker-adjacent, and he’s going to help her.  
  
“You can start by sitting in on my classes, if you like,” he offers. “We’re a few weeks into the semester, but we’re about to begin virtue ethics.”  
  
“Ugh, that sounds–“ she sees his eyebrows start to raise again “–like exactly what I need!” A genuine sense of gratitude washes over her, a tiny spark of what she suspects this whole ‘be a Good Person’ thing is all about. She likes it. “Thank you, man. Seriously. Wait, do I call you Professor? Doctor? Uh…  _sir_? No, who am I kidding, that’ll never happen.”  
  
He smiles back. “Chidi is fine.”

* * *

 _  
“I reserve the right to change my mind at any point.”  
  
__“About what?!” Eleanor half-yells in exasperation. She knows now Michael is trying to help them, knows that he must genuinely believe that whatever he’s got up his sleeve is their best option, but she’s had enough secrecy and plans and plot-twists for one lifetime, let alone eight hundred and change.  
  
__Whatever it is, though, it can’t be worse than an interminable stretch of time in a Medium Place by herself. She hadn’t been particularly bothered with annoying things like self-reflection on Earth, but she does know that leaving herself to her own devices for long periods was generally inadvisable. Ryan Lochte and Kid Rock could testify to that, admittedly for very different reasons.  
  
__Also Chidi just kissed her, and now the world was folding in on itself.  
  
__Her Medium Place would be… endless repeats of dubbed foreign remakes of her favorite shows where the jokes never quite translated, every kind of seafood except shrimp and all of it boiled, chips that were both slightly stale and a little soft at the same time. Just old Doritos and mediocrity all the way down.  
  
__It would be being allowed to hold onto the memory of Chidi, of Tahani and Jason and Janet and weddings and “finding designer jeans in your exact size at a killer sample sale”-flavor frozen yoghurt and the stupid architecturally superior house whose walls held everything together, without the reality of them.  
  
__Chidi just kissed her, and it’s everything she’s been waiting for, and she swears to God, if Michael is about to fork this up for them again there will be literal hell to pay. She’s been there, she knows the drill.  
  
__“Will somebody please tell me what the…”  
  
__Chidi just kissed her, and she’s dizzy, and she really,_ really _doesn’t want to go to her Medium Place or any place at all actually without him and_ _—  
  
__—snap.  
  
_

* * *

   
It’s a few weeks later, and she’s graduated from the classroom to one-on-one lessons over coffee. This is, she’s forced to admit, partially because she kept antagonising the Australian undergraduates over their pronunciation of Kant, but _also_ because she’s been showing a steady and impressive improvement in being A Good Person. At least, she thinks she’s improving. It’s probably mostly the Kant thing.  
  
They take a seat in the outdoor area of a little café tucked into a far corner of the main campus – “there’s never a bad coffee or a line-up here,” he’d marvelled, the first time he taken her there, “it’s like heaven on Earth” – and she fixes him with a stern gaze before he can launch into yet another attempt to convince her that Heidegger wasn’t actually out to personally bore her to death.    
  
“So I was talking to Jared, and by the way, why do you even have a T.A. if you don’t trust him to grade the exams,” she says, licking the froth off of her spoon and using it to gesture at him accusingly, “and he told me that you were way less cool last year. I think his exact words were ‘completely indecisive and yet as rigid as a sailor’s dick after a month at sea,’ which, gross.”  
  
He blinks. “Well, that’s… a troubling mental image.”  
  
“But true?”  
  
“I've never been good at making decisions, and once I started studying moral philosophy... it’s very easy to get caught up in analysing all the ethical outcomes of any one choice and never actually, um, _make_ that choice. I once had a panic attack playing Rock Paper Scissors.”  
  
“What changed?” she asks, genuinely curious. The Chidi she’s getting to know is a mostly-endearing balance of composure and principles and the nervy fretfulness of an aging grandmother. He might take forever to choose what cheese he wants on his sandwich, sometimes, but he applies the same careful thought process to marking term papers fairly even when he doesn’t _like_ the student, so. It comes from a Good place.  
  
He smiles, a little bashfully. “I, um, actually also had a near death experience. A little over a year ago, a freak accident, when an air conditioning unit fell from an apartment when I was standing on the sidewalk below. It missed me by inches.”  
  
Her stomach clenches once again with the unsettling familiarity of him. There's a feelingshe can never shake, foggy and undefined but always _there,_ that there’s something so much bigger than the two of them at play here; but it's like fine grains of sand slipping through her fingers, and she can never grasp at enough of the details to make it all add up.   
  
“And I had the same moment you did," he continues. "I saw my life, and I saw all the times that my anxiety and my indecision ruined things for the people I cared about. So I tried to change that.”  
  
“Is that why you agreed to help me?”  
  
“Eleanor, I agreed to help you because it was an act of public service,” he retorts, with a small smirk at her melodramatic gasp of offence, and then, “I recognised something of what you were going through. I mean, not entirely, because I never got drunk and started a Twitter fight with Rob Kardashian over whether he deserved his placement on _Dancing with the Stars_ _—"  
  
_ “That was one time!” she interrupts. “I never should have told you that.”  
  
“ _—_ but that need to improve something about yourself, in dire circumstances? I understood that.”  
  
They’re interrupted by a giant white bird with a long, curved beak, flapping gracelessly down from the low rooftop of the café onto the ground beside them, skimming the edge of their table and taking Eleanor’s napkin with it. She lets out a little shriek and pitches a sugar packet at it.  
  
“Okay, let’s say, hypothetically, that there was some sort of a points system to being ethical,” she posits, when the bird has darted a safe distance away. “Like… ooh, like a Fitbit for my soul. How many points do you think I’d lose if I napalmed every single one of these devil birds?”  
  
“Killing is one of the most famous moral… no-nos, so probably quite a few.”  
  
“Ugh, come on, man, there is no way that trying to get rid of these forking bin chickens is a bad thing. _They’re_ the bad things! It’d be one small murder-y thing for the sake of a better society. The greater good and all that. I bet there’s a dead French guy out there who’d back me up on that.” She gestures at the stack of books on the table, hoping she’s pointing vaguely at a semi-relevant one.  
  
He shakes his head, but he’s pressing his lips together in the way that’s she’s come to understand means he’s both dismayed and amused by her ethical flexibility.  “Also, they’re a protected species, so it’s a legal, uh, no-no as well.”  
  
“Well luckily, my dude, you’re not my law Yoda.” Eleanor regards the bird, now foraging through the trash left behind on the table next to them, and shudders. “If hell is real, these are definitely what people have as pets.”

* * *

 _  
“It’s not that I couldn’t love you,” he’d said, and those words stay with her, a record stuck on repeat in her mind as they dance, and drink, and prepare to say goodbye to the Fake Good Place and all the parts of the people they’ve become that it will keep.  
  
__It’s stuck there as Michael roars with laughter when he recounts incidents that he alone recalls from all of his attempts at torturing them. “That was version one!” he guffaws during a story about booting a tiny dog into the sun during a rain of garbage. She laughs, too – because after quite a few bottles of wine, the thought of all the times she’d apparently majorly forked with Michael’s plan_ does _seem pretty funny – but it stirs a strange hollowness in her chest.  
  
__It repeats as she lays next to Chidi that night, not touching, not talking, not sleeping. He hadn’t questioned her when she’d climbed into bed next to him, and he hadn’t needed to tell her that he didn’t really want to be alone either. It’s not just the chalkboard and the clowns and the Icelandic architecture that they’re leaving behind.  
  
__There have been eight hundred and two versions of them now, eight hundred and two times in which they tried in every manner conceivable to be Better, and somehow, in one of them, they fell in love. She just doesn’t remember_ how.  
  
_She reaches out for his hand in the dark, and he threads his fingers through hers, warm and steady.  
  
__Maybe, in the Real Good Place, they’ll find their way back there.  
  
_

* * *

  
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he says as he sets a latte down in front of her, herbal tea for him, a muffin in the neutral middle-table zone where it will stay for approximately six and a half minutes until it mysteriously migrates over next to her coffee cup.  
  
She sighs. She’d figured this was coming, had been expecting it for weeks, really. “Fine, okay, yes, I was the one who booed you that one time when you gave out extra reading for the long weekend. But in my defence, everybody else _wanted_ to do it. So really, I was acting for the common good, which I think is what you’ll find ol’ Jack… Joe…  J… K. Rowling? Ooh, she’s British.”  
  
“Do you mean _Rawls_?”  
  
“Rawls! Yes. That guy. It’s what Rawls would have wanted me to do. Boom! Consider yourself ethics-ed.”  
  
“Okay, not that, and also not strictly a correct application of Rawlsian philosophy, which sort of proves that you needed that assignment. His first name was John, by the way.”  
  
“Oh, actually, I did know that, because you talked about him so much I thought you were going to start doodling “Chidi Rawls” on the blackboard inside a little heart. Why do you even still use a blackboard, anyway? I mean, don’t get me wrong, your arms are _surprisingly_ jacked from what I assume is the constant erasing you have to do, but you do know about computers, right?” She trails off when she sees that his face is serious. Not in the “yes, Eleanor, once again, a crucial part of the term ‘group project’ is the word ‘group’” kind of way, but a real, capital-S Serious way that she’s not sure she’s ever actually seen before.  
  
“What’s up?”  
  
“Why did you come here?”  
  
She lets out a half-laugh, a little sigh of relief.  
  
“I told you: almost dead, birthday, weird bartender, “what we owe to each other,” your long nerdy talk was the first link that came up when I Googled. A link that I watched in full, by the way. Did I ever mention that? All four parts, not even on double speed. You are _thorough,_ my dude _._ ”  
  
He inclines his head in amusement, maybe agreement, but doesn’t take the subject-change bait she’s dangling. “There are moral philosophers in Phoenix, Eleanor, they also all know about the little voice. Why did you come _here_?”  
  
She huffs in exasperation. “I don’t _know,_ okay, man? I don’t know how to explain it. I went through a lot of shirt last year, and at the end of it all your talk was the first thing that made sense to me. It made me feel like I finally understood _why_ people can get so horny for the environment, or half marathons for cancer or whatever _._ ”  
  
She toys with her spoon, not quite meeting his eyes, cursing St John’s University’s commitment to waste-free cafes because she could really use the cardboard sleeve of a to-go cup to shred into tiny pieces right now. Sensing that he’s about to say something, she quickly plows ahead.  
  
“And you felt… familiar, for some reason, which I know sounds categorically insane, but it’s true. It was like I knew you somehow. And when I thought about coming here, to you, it just felt… right. So I went with it, because I’ve never gone with the thing that felt right before.”  
  
His eyes are wide, an expression of mild dread glancing across his face. “That’s… I mean, that’s… a lot,” he says, ducking his head momentarily, away from her honesty. “That’s quite the leap into faith.”  
  
She nods, swallowing hard, spoon tapping a rapid, jumpy rhythm against the thin ceramic coffee cup. “I know. I know. And I never meant to make it a burden on you, or anything like that. I just… I was kinda in over my head, and I didn’t think I could do it on my own.”  
  
He reaches out and stills her faltering drumming, briefly rubbing his thumb over her knuckles.  
  
“You don’t have to, Eleanor,” he says, and now it’s a reassuring certainty that colors his voice. “I'm still not sure this is what Kierkegaard meant, but... whatever this is, you're not in it alone.”

* * *

 _  
After counselling Janet through her Jason-Tahani-Derek crisis (which, okay, the fact that a not-human not-robot was somehow more adept at processing a particularly human emotional quandary than she was was a bit of a blow to the ego, she’s not gonna lie), she sits in her living room, alone with her uncertainties and the sex tape that lays them all bare.  
  
__She thinks.  
  
__She watches the tape again. (And again).  
  
__She sits some more.  
  
__She had loved Chidi, had been_ in love _with him, had been enough in love with him to tell him so and not even worry whether or not he was ready to say it back.  
  
__She… loves? Chidi now. She definitely_ likes _Chidi now. She likes spending time with him and she likes learning ethics from him and she likes making the tiny vein in his forehead pop when she says something super non-ethical followed by a wink (and sometimes followed by her yelling the word “wink!” to drive it home). She likes the way his anxiety dissipates when he stands next to the chalkboard, like it’s absorbing all his nervous energy and turning into passion. She likes the way he provides the moral compass and sense of shame that their little gang of reforming dirt-bags and demons so sorely needs.  
  
__She likes the way he moves around her kitchen with quiet domesticity, the way his voice gets a touch gravelly late at night.  
  
__(She likes the surprisingly taut muscles in his back, the way they shift and tense and ripple underneath his skin. Whatever, she snuck a peak when he was leaving the bathroom after a shower one time. She’s human.)  
  
__But she had loved him with a fiery certainty, in another life, and he had loved her back. Doesn’t he deserve to know that? There’s so much of all of them that’s missing, shouldn’t he get to have any piece that he can?  
  
__(If she doesn’t admit to herself that the real reason she wants to show him the tape is that she wants a measure of his feelings for her now – wants to know that it’s not just her experiencing that trembling frisson of electricity when he brushes past her, an energy that now feels charged by all the admissions within their unknown pasts – she doesn’t have to weigh up the moral implications of that action, and lying to yourself is further down on the list of Bad Things than lying to someone else.  
  
__Yeah, she knows that’s a lie, too. It’s all just a giant clam-chowder-fountain of lies and none of them are Better because none of them will do anyone any Good.)  
  
__She can’t tell him, but it’s okay. If she doesn't tell him it's not a lie, it's a secret, and it’s okay to keep a secret. Chidi said so, she reminds herself. It’s okay to keep a secret if it’s not hurting anyone.  
  
__It’s hurting her._

* * *

  
They go out to dinner to celebrate the end of the university’s exam period, the blissful couple of days before he starts getting requests for extra credit and supplementary assignments and other Hail Mary attempts at a better final grade. She does not secretly gloat at the students’ misery (she was there when he wrote the three-hour long closed book exam, and okay, maybe she did keep suggesting he add more questions, it’s not like _she_ had to take it), because she is a Good Person now and Good People do not revel in others’ pain. She doesn’t.  
  
She does, however, order him a custom t-shirt that proclaims “deontologist in the streets, existentialist in the sheets” in bold block letters as an end-of-semester present, and the expression of sheer horror on his face when he opens the bag is more than worth the exorbitant price she paid for next-day shipping.  
  
She’s pretty sure he’ll never wear it. (She’s pretty sure that’s not the point.)  
  
“Hey, nerd boy?” she asks after their meals have been delivered, delighting in the way the nickname makes his left eye twitch. (Good People don’t _always_ revel in others’ pain).   “What does philosophy say about fate?”  
  
He hums thoughtfully, swirling his spoon through the bouillabaisse that it had taken him under nine minutes to choose – a new record. “Like everything, it would depend who you asked. Aristotle would say that things occur out of a universal necessity, but that we’re not required to simply submit to our fates.  Just because an event _will_ logically happen as a consequence of previous events, doesn’t mean that it _has_ to happen. But the Stoics believed that all events, including our moral choices, are determined by pre-existing causes; so whatever humans do, whatever actions they take or choices they make, are because they cannot do otherwise. We’re bound to our fate.”  
  
“What do you think?”  
  
“It’s not exactly my area. And I think… part of what I’ve learned in the last year is that I’m never going to be able to come up with a theory that allows for all the ways in which the universe works, or should work, or all the ways in which people work, and I have to be okay with that.” He shakes his head. “Or, well, I’m working on being okay with that. Sometimes it still gives me a stomach ache.”  
  
She shivers, even though it’s a balmy night and the breeze coming in from the marina has no chill to it. It's the complaint of a morally-induced stomach ache, the boyish smile he cracks when he’s excited, the tiny twitch of his nose just before he sneezes; these parts of him that she seems to know so intuitively that they're a part of her too. She thinks she must have lived this before, in another life, another version of him and her fitting into place together.  
  
She’s not entirely sure about fate, either, but it probably feels like this.  
  
“Do you ever feel like—” and her voice is way more brashly confident than her heart is because what if he doesn’t, actually? “ _—_ I mean, just with everything that we both went through… do you ever feel like maybe you were meant to meet me?”.  
  
He looks at her, brown eyes bright and warm behind his thick lenses, reflecting the lights dancing across the harbour. “I’m starting to think maybe I was,” and it’s true.  
  
He takes hold of her hand across the table.

* * *

 _  
She asks Janet to rustle up an escape train and a shedload of cocaine and prepares to do a runner. It’s not that she_ wants _to leave them behind, as such. But out of the handful of shitty options that Michael’s presented them with, the least shitty would appear to be an eternity spent hiding in the Medium Place with a compulsive masturbator and a stack of second-rate gossip magazines from the 80s.  
  
__She could learn to love skirt suits and beige-wallpapered-everything. She_ could.  
  
_Chidi wishes her luck, in a quiet, disappointed way that makes her feel so small inside, and she stares at his retreating form as he disappears back into the house. Her house, where he and his chalkboard and his books and his uncompromising need to do what’s right already live.  
  
__Their house.  
  
__She thinks about the notecards lining the back of the very mediocre wall art above Mindy’s fireplace, an archive of their previous failures. She thinks about the flash of hurt in his eyes when she’d called him boring, an argument that felt so comfortably familiar even though it was the first time they’d had it. Mindy’s words start to bug her, “You guys have known each other a really long time,” because apparently they’d decided to stick it out together every one of those times like a bunch of sentimental idiots.  
  
__Even if it has only been a week as far as she’s concerned (even if it has been a_ really long time _otherwise), Chidi’s teaching is obviously already having an effect because now she feels guilty for wanting to bail, guilty for not thinking about what would happen to the rest of them if she ditched them in this literal hell-hole. This whole morality thing was becoming a massive pain in her ass.  
  
__She heaves a sigh, and goes back inside to stick it out together one more time.  
  
__“He always helped you,” Michael tells her_ _—  
  
__—the realisation hits her with unexpected force: she hates that he knows this, knows all the loose threads of their other selves that would tie everything together. He knows this and they don’t and she hates that he gets to hide these parts of them like pocket aces. But she doesn’t have time to unpack that right now_ _—  
  
__— “No matter how I set it up, you found him.”  
  
__He always helped her. Whether they were fake soulmates or not, whether they fell in love or into bed or not… eight hundred and two Chidis sacrificed a settled stomach in the name of saving her soul. Every time.  
  
__She’s so forked.  
  
__(“I’m sorry I called you boring,” she’ll tell him later, after Team Cockroach is made official, because the guilt is still all balled up in her throat. “Thank you for always helping me,” and his shy smile is worth staying put in hell for a while longer.)  
  
_

* * *

  
It’s a still and muggy evening, spring having firmly faded into a sticky summer. Eleanor pulls the sheet up over the both of them, cool cotton against slightly sweaty skin, and curls up against his side in the semi-darkness.  
  
“Do you believe in soulmates?” she asks languidly and seemingly apropos of nothing; runs a hand across his stomach, leaves a trail of goose-bumps in its wake. “Didn’t Plato invent them or something?”  
  
Chidi yawns. “Eleanor, you want to discuss philosophy _now_?”  
  
“Oh whatever, this is dirty talk for you.”  
  
“Plato wrote,” with a reprimanding poke to her ribs, “that soul mates were literally two halves of the same person, split right down the middle, who were doomed to wander the earth searching for each other so that they could be whole again together.”  
  
She wrinkles her nose. “That sounds super depressing and kind of gory, actually.”  
  
He chuckles. “It turns out a lot of the classics aren’t as cut and dry romantic as people make them out to be.”  
  
“But you don’t agree?” she asks, propping her chin on his shoulder.  
  
“I like the idea, in principle, I suppose” he says, now contemplative, and she can practically see the wheels of choice grind to a hesitating halt in his head, just for a second. “But what if the conviction of a perfect match makes us complacent? If it’s our duty in life to better ourselves, the idea that we’re already destined for someone out there just as we are might stop us doing that. It can't be as simple as the notion of just having an other half.”  
  
“Wow. Wow wow wowwwwww. So even after the way I just went to town on you, you don’t think I could be your soulmate, dummy?” She intends it as a joke, punctuated with a theatrical groan, but it comes out solemn instead, heavy with the weight of the existential knots she’s been tying herself into for the last year. She has no other explanation for the connection she's felt to him since before she even met him.   
  
“Well, we did meet in exactly the way I always hoped I’d find the woman I would fall in love with – through philosophy – so it does seem like you’re universe-approved,” he quips. “But… not the way that Plato described it, no. I don’t.”  
  
He turns on his side to face her, and in the dim blue-black light of the bedroom, she can sense more than see his gaze. She knows the look he’s fixed on her, anyway, can feel the sincerity and earnestness pouring out of him.   
  
“I didn’t need you to make me whole, Eleanor,” he tells her, stroking his fingers softly up and down her arm. “No person makes another person whole. Even Plato eventually recognised the fallacy of that idea. You make me better. You’ve made my life better. And in another life, or another set of circumstances… I do like to think that we would still have met, somehow, and the same would still be true.”  
  
He kisses her temple, brushes her hair back with a quiet intimacy that she could never have imagined being fulfilled by in the past. She lays there, staring at the ceiling, long after he’s fallen asleep.  
  
She was definitely a dirtbag, she’s more than willing to admit that now. She was not a Good Person in so many ways, but she’s trying to be Better, and most days she thinks she’s succeeding. And she’ll probably never be the kind of person who _always_ puts her clothes in the hamper rather than flinging them with abandon into various corners of the room, but Chidi can help her with the big things. And Chidi, Chidi’s probably always going to be a little indecisive and cautious, but she can help him with that, too. And it just might be okay if they kept helping each other be Better, if she stayed here, with him and the good coffee and the kangaroos, forev _—  
  
__—_ snap.

* * *

 _  
“I mean, this place doesn’t seem terrible. Maybe we should just stay here forever,” Eleanor suggests, looking around Mindy’s beige-flowered guest room, where the patterns on the wallpaper are ever so slightly out of alignment and the carpet stops a quarter inch before the baseboard. There’s a mark above the dresser opposite the bed that looks suspiciously like a hole, but she doesn’t really have time to think about that right now.  
  
__Chidi’s pacing around the room in distress – five steps, turns, five steps, repeat – and it’s making her dizzy.  
  
__“We can’t stay here. But what can we do? We can’t not do what we’ve done before because we don’t know what we’ve done before, but we also can’t do what we’ve done before because what we did do before clearly didn’t work. And what about the others?” He sinks down onto the mattress. “This is an epistemological nightmare.”  
  
__“You’re an epistemological nightmare,” she mutters under her breath, just as the little voice in her head reminds her that her mockery – although_ hilarious – _is quite clearly not the most beneficial thing to be doing in this situation. It’s not what a Good Person would do.  
  
__“Okay, Chidi, Chidi, dude, you have_ got _to stop and take a breath,” she says, stepping between his legs to grab him by the upper arms, forcing him to look up at her. “We can do this, okay? You and me. We just have to come up with a new plan.”  
  
__How many times have they done this? How many times have they figured out Michael’s game, how many times have they had to come up with a new plan? How many times has she stood in front of him and frantically tried to think of a way to keep them all together?  
  
__His shoulders are shaking a little beneath her hands, his breathing heaving and irregular, but he’s looking up at her like he believes her. Believes_ in _her.  
  
__How many times has he looked at her like this, and made her realise that she’s really glad she’s not in this alone?  
  
__“Chidi,” she says again, and kisses him.  
  
_

* * *

  
“ _—fork_ is going on?”  
  
Eleanor looks around the Judge’s chambers, slightly disoriented all of a sudden, the kind of burst of intense sensation you get when someone switches the lights on unexpectedly in a dark room. Michael and Janet are beaming at each other as Gen nods in approval, and Jason, Tahani, and Chidi all look as confused and unsettled as she feels.  
  
“You guys! You did it! You all did it! Oh, I knew you could.” Michael enthusiastically tries to clutch them all into a hug together, which ends with her head awkwardly wedged between his armpit and Tahani’s ribs. She leans in for a moment, because she’s still not _not_ into it, and then clumsily extracts herself.  
  
“What just happened? What did you do to us?”  
  
Michael grins. “We sent you back to your old lives on Earth. A little test simulation, to see if you all could improve the lives you were leading before you died without knowing about the consequences, or the rewards, or any of this. And you did! You all did. Oh, I’m so proud. I was watching the whole time.”  
  
“Did you see me in the shower?” Jason asks him. “Because homie, the water in Florida is cold.”  
  
“You reset us _again?_ ” Eleanor asks disbelievingly, cutting in before Jason can completely derail things with something like a story about his and Pillboi's plans to open a restaurant that only served foods that started with the letter J. (She's already heard the "bar with, like, topless waitresses, but they're bottomless" plan, she can guess how it ends). “But I remember everything." She reaches back for Chidi’s hand, something to hold on to to steady herself, because oh yeah, she definitely remembers that too.  
  
Then, a more pressing thought. "But if we're still here, how long were we... there? How does that even work?"  
  
“No, it wasn't a reset; more like a short intermission. Like hitting pause. We're still in the same reboot as we were when you came here. And the time there, well. It varied a bit for each of you,” Michael acknowledges, swiping at the air to reveal a holographic screen full of charts and figures. He scrolls through, muttering to himself - "humans can't even see that colour, why would you put it in a table?" - and stops on a complicated streamgraph with their four faces displayed in the corners.   
  
“Tahani… nine months. Boy, you _really_ threw yourself into it. We were all very impressed. You even raised another three hundred million dollars.” From her position perched against Gen’s desk, Tahani smiles proudly, and accepts Jason’s excited high-five.  
  
“Jason. Well, Jason was a bit of a special situation, but about four years. In the end.”  
  
A wide, hopeful smile spreads across Jason's face. "Dawg! Four years? Does that mean I went to college?"  
  
Michael throws his head back and laughs, sharp peals of genuine amusement rippling outwards. "Oh, Jason. No."  
  
Jason shrugs, nodding slowly. "That's cool. Probably would have had to finish high school. Also the community college in Jacksonville got shut down because they found out some of the teachers were, like, meth dealers. Or alligators." Janet nods along with him in support.   
  
“And as for Eleanor and Chidi… a little over two years.”  
  
Eleanor squints at her chart, trying to make sense of the way it converges with Chidi's, wavy sections of color that begin separated and end twisted around each other like thick mutualist vines. “Wait, we met? We were… together?”  
  
There’s a beat of silence, just the slightest pause; then Michael says “not at first”, and in the space between those seconds Eleanor understands that another version of herself has just been erased. “But yes, you crossed paths.” Then he waves the screen away.  
  
Gen claps her hands. “Well, that’s settled. I’m so glad we got to do this, you guys, because I _really_ binged the second season of _Jessica Jones_ too quickly, and there have been no new cases since you, so without your whole prolonged deal I would have just been dying of boredom. You know. Figuratively.” She wanders off, paperwork in hand, presumably to secure their places in eternity.  
  
Eleanor slumps back against Chidi, who wordlessly folds her into him, for once the steadier of the two. There's a hundred questions swimming around in her head, a thousand things she needs explained and then explained again with less reliance on a superhuman understanding of abstract temporal orientation, but in this exact moment, there's only:  
  
"Okay dude, so, before all of... whatever in the name of sweet holy fork that was, we will deal with that hot garbage fire in just a minute, but before that. I think you were kissing me?" She twists around to look at him and cocks an eyebrow.   
  
"I, uh, I think I was," he agrees. "That sounds familiar."  
  
"It's not that I'm complaining, believe me, we should definitely do that some more, you know, for science" - she cranes her neck up and does it some more, for science, to prove her point -"but, just so we're actually on the same page... why now, after everything else?"  
  
After a long minute he admits, “it was Plato's cave," and she thinks he might be blushing.   
  
She groans. "Ugh, why is Plato always the third wheel with you?"  
  
He elbows her side in feigned admonishment. "We were all in the dark, but then I wasn't, and it was you. You were my flashlight,” he says with a crooked grin, his arms solid around her once more, and for a split second it sounds like a refrain she’s heard somewhere before.  


* * *

  
_“You were my flashlight,” she’d told him, minutes before she’d figured out the truth, and it might be the closest she’s ever come to being emotionally honest with a guy who wasn’t Steve Austin. He’d deserved it (Chidi, not Steve Austin). After everything he’d done for her, honesty is the least she owed him in that moment.  
  
__And now Michael’s going to reset their memories, start his game again and play a different hand, and she’s going to forget everything Chidi taught her. All the progress she’d made. All the time and effort he’d invested in her, even when it caused him a serious stomach-ache. She can casually – and correctly – reference Kant in a sentence now, for fork’s sake. She’d been getting there.  
  
__(She feels a brief pang of sympathy for the future Eleanor who, if she manages to meet future Chidi, will also probably end up having to sit through the week on Heidegger. Even by her incredibly low-set bar, that guy was a German snooze-fest.  
  
“The _ wurst,” _she had complained to Chidi, who had not, in her opinion, been nearly as appreciative of her pun as he ought to have been.)  
  
__She’s going to forget **him**. Him, and Tahani, and Jason, and this whole forked-up little family they’ve accidentally built along the way. She is Better because of all of them, because of everything they’ve gone through together, and now she’s going to be back in the cave alone.  
  
__Desperate to give the future (past?) Arizona-dirtbag-Eleanor a chance, she scribbles the only thing she can think that might bring them all together again the next time.  
  
_

* * *

  
There is, it turns out, also a lot of paperwork involved in getting into the Good Place. Gen has disappeared somewhere into the limitless whatever that exists beyond the doors of her chambers, and the rest of them have been left in limbo once more. Just each other and a bowl of chips and guac to pass the timelessness.  
  
She sits, restless and uneasy, on the chaise lounge at the far end of the room, curled up in front of Chidi. Chidi, whose heart is beating so hard she can feel it through his skin and hers, and who has one arm tucked up awkwardly behind her so that he can softly rub her back. Chidi, who has twenty-two mildly-contrasting pinstriped button-up shirts that look more or less identical because it’s the only way he can choose what to wear every day without his brain melting.  
  
Chidi, whom she has spent nearly a thousand lifetimes looking for, and whom she always finds.  
  
She pats him on the knee, squeezing softly, and corners Michael on the opposite side of the room, trying to summon the courage she’d had when she was 23 and convincing a bouncer that she was one of the Hilton cousins.  
  
“I need to know, dude,” she tells him. “We did it. We passed the test, we earned our spot, and I need to know how.  Because this _—_ “ she gestures between herself and Chidi “ _—_ we fought for this, obviously, and I need to know why it’s working now when it only ever did once before.”  
  
Michael shakes his head. “That’s not how it works, Eleanor. You know that. The test was just a simulation, and the resets, they were never even supposed to occur. Technically, none of that time even exists. Oh, I wish humans could comprehend the fifth and sixth dimensions, it would be so much easier to explain."  
  
“You’re telling me the freaking Good Place can’t rustle up a way to just, I don’t know, slot those memories in somewhere between my eighth birthday and watching Jason try to eat scented soap just now? I was only thirty…,” remembers that she’s truthful now, does the real math “…four when I died, there’s plenty of room.”  
  
“It’s not that they can’t, Eleanor. It’s that they _won’t_.”  
  
“I found him _eight hundred and two_ forking times, Michael,” she hisses. Her eyes drift back to Chidi, as they seem inclined to do now, and her heart actually aches with how much of him – of _them_ – she’ll never know. “No matter what you did, remember? I found him and he helped me. Eight hundred and _three,_ actually, thanks to that little ‘surprise, you’re not dead!’ "simulation""— dripping with enough sarcasm to power half a dozen mediocre open mic nights — "and _obviously_ something big happened there because you're all shifty and weird about it. Eight. Hundred. And three. That’s, like, a billion! I have gone through hell, _literally,_ a billion times to get here and you’re telling me that I’m not allowed to remember it?”  
  
He looks down at her, his eyes soft with something that she’d call empathy if he were human, and the intensity of his gaze makes a lump rise in her throat. She almost forgets, sometimes, how much farther than them he’s had to come for redemption, that her eight hundred little lives have nothing on the eternity he’s fighting against.   
  
“This is the only version that matters now,” he says, as gently as a slowly-reforming demon puppet-master can. “Chidi loves you. Here, in this… well, let’s call it a life. Think about it, Eleanor. Do you really want to remember all the times he didn’t?”  
  
She does. She wants all of him.  


* * *

_  
The “Fork Off Eleanor” sign is now stuck haphazardly to the fridge by a magnet shaped like a shrimp, and she regards it the way she imagines a proud parent would display their kid’s crappy finger-painting. Like they were Monets. Like they were artefacts to be enshrined.  
__  
__He’d never used it. She’s not entirely sure if it’s because he’s never actually wanted to or he’s just too kind, but the fact remains.  
  
__It’s an unsympathetic reminder, sometimes, of how different she is even now. How far she’s come from Old Eleanor, who never would have made a sign admitting that sometimes she needed to fork off._ _Old Eleanor would never have listened closely enough to his ramblings to know that he wanted to read boring French poetry on a boat, let alone actually go to the trouble of organising said boat. Old Eleanor would_ definitely _have kept mispronouncing his name just to infuriate him, which, okay, maybe she still actually does sometimes.  
  
__Chidi wouldn’t have been able to stand her on Earth.  
  
__“You would have strangled the nerd within three minutes of indecision about a happy hour cocktail,” she reminds herself, because lord knows he’s far from flawless, but the thought isn’t as comforting as she wants it to be.  
  
_

* * *

  
The Real Good Place is, it turns out, a lot like the Fake Good Place, with the very important difference of not being an experimental hell dimension. Their community has cobbled streets and flowerboxes and a wholly appropriate ratio of frozen yoghurt shops to other restaurants. The souls spending their eternity there have houses and pets and hobbies, and jobs, if they want them, or all-regions Netflix if they don’t.  
  
They’re neighbors, again, because at this point, living further apart than a garden fence was never an option. Jason lives with Janet in Tahani’s second largest pool house, and Tahani lives with a sleek tabby cat and a roster of devoted suitors. Eleanor and Chidi’s home, which features 99.7% less Icelandic primitivistic style than their previous one, has a lot of books and a replacement shrimp vending machine and exactly zero clowns in it.  
  
“So, wait, soulmates actually do exist?” Eleanor asks Michael, as the entire group take a slow, familiarising stroll around a part of the neighborhood they haven’t explored yet. "Is that what New Janet was saying?"  
  
“Well, yes, although not in the instant-perfect-match way that we sold it to you in the Bad Place,” jazz hands added to the “perfect match” for emphasis. He had been enthusiastically expanding his repertoire of human gestures ever since Eleanor had taught him how to use air quotes correctly. “It’s… something that grows. Every person has a number of potential soulmates during their time on Earth. They usually cross paths with at least a few of them, and they feel some sort of connection. But then it’s up to the individuals to nurture that connection. To make it real. In the end, people are soulmates because they want to be. They _choose_ to be. Sometimes that happens on Earth. And sometimes it happens here instead.”  
  
She looks to Chidi walking just ahead, deep in discussion with Tahani about an obscure and depressing French movie they both claim to have actually enjoyed, and smiles.  
  
They wander a bit further, near the outskirts where the houses become sparser, giving way to a gently tangled woodland snaked through with hiking paths and softly-burbling streams.  
  
“I gotta say, man, this really is some Sound of Music-type shirt they’ve whipped up here,” Eleanor says with a smirk, gesturing at their surrounds. Everything is green and lush and rolling, and the hills _do_ seem to be alive, somehow.  
  
“Oh, Julie Andrews, I love her,” Tahani trills delightedly, slowing her pace so that they all fall into step together. “Dear friend. We used to share a box at the opera.”  
  
“Fun fact,” Janet pipes up from behind them, because old habits die hard and she might be retired here but she’ll never not be _helpful_ , “Julie Andrews is the voice of the weather station here in the Good Place.”  
  
Off to the left, Jason chases after a butterfly.  
  
They made it. This is real.

* * *

 _  
“Eleanor?”  
  
__She turns away from Michael and the screen with someone else’s life playing on it. There’s a guy at her door, wearing a pinstriped button up and a smile so wide it’s making his eyes crinkle. He looks like he’s in heaven.  
  
__She guesses that makes sense.  
  
__“I’m Chidi Anagonye, and you are… my soulmate.”  
  
__She’s not supposed to be here. Someone else was supposed to deserve this creepy modernist clown house, and this guy with the kind eyes, and this afterlife. None of this is real, even if in this exact moment she really,_ really _wants it to be.  
  
__In the face of having suddenly coming to terms with the sum total of her existence – she’s never been_ great _at math, but she knows it’s a pretty small sum – she reverts to doing one of the things she’s always done best. She lies.  
_  
_“Bring in in, man!”_

* * *

  
Something wakes her at what would be about three in the morning if time truly existed in the Good Place. Her head is sleep-cloudy but the words “bring it in, man!” are lingering at the back of her mind, unexplained and forlorn. An echo from a sound that was never actually made.  
  
Most days here really are Good, in the best, most non-mundane meaning of the word. She falls asleep next to Chidi, and even if she does steal the covers and make herself into a blanket burrito and then sometimes sleep-kick him because of that recurring dream where she’s Kung Fu Panda, she always wakes up next to him too. He makes her breakfast, and the pancakes are always perfectly browned and the syrup is the real Canadian shirt and the flippy-trick he insists on doing is, like, 83% successful.  
  
Julie Andrews tells her it’s 78 and sunny, with the option of a soft breeze available if she’d like it.  
  
The little voice in her head only pipes up occasionally, like when she considers hacking Jason’s X-Box so that the Jaguars can _never win,_ or when she’s about to use the last of the milk and put the empty carton back in the fridge to mess with Chidi (and even then, sometimes she does that anyway and writes a filthy note on it to make him blush; because this is the Real Good Place, and messing with him like this is part of the reward, and New Janet can always just bring them more milk.)  
  
It's not heaven, because that's trademarked, but it's Good.   
  
She only finds herself questioning it, then, in the tiny moments in between all that Good, when the blank spaces that separate what she knows and what she’s been allowed to remember start to gnaw at her. Like the nights she wakes up from a dream – not the Kung Fu Panda one – that seems a little too detailed, a little too specific, and she can’t help but wonder if it’s the resolution to one of those spaces. Like tonight.  
  
“Chidi,” she says, poking him in the arm. For someone who still gets mildly anxious when confronted with too many pizza toppings, he’s an incredibly peaceful sleeper. “Chiiiiiiiidi.”  
  
“Shhhhhs’okay you’re not a panda,” he mumbles in his sleep, patting at her hip reassuringly.  
  
“No, Chidi,” she says more urgently, ignoring his grunt of displeasure and shaking him awake. “Why didn’t we fall in love again before?”  
  
He stares at her wordlessly, blinking, for a long moment, as if he’s trying to parse her question. Scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands, blinks some more. “It was… the fork _,_ ” he finally replies, half-conscious and fully-confused. “I told you that. The garbage disposal and my brain fork.”  
  
She shakes her head. “That was the last time. What about all the others? What do you think happened in Attempt 119 that never happened again?”  
  
“I don’t know, Eleanor,” he says slowly, patiently. He’s always patient with her, in her doubtful moments, because this – this life that they’ve finally made together now that they’re dead – is the one thing that never seems to vex him now. “I wish I did, you know I do, but I don’t. We just... meant different things to each other, every time, and somehow it all added up in that version.”  
  
“And in this one,” she pushes. She may never make peace with the fact that eight hundred plus other versions of her are floating around in the universal consciousness, but version eight hundred and three turned out to be everything she can imagine wanting anyway. She’s going to make damn sure it stays that way.   
  
“Yes,” he murmurs, pulling her back down to curl into him, claiming back his half of the blanket as he does. “Always, forever, in this one.”

* * *

 _  
It’s not that Eleanor doesn’t want to be a Good Person, whatever that means. It’s just that she’s never really known_ how.  _And, like, kids aren’t born knowing how to ride a bicycle or do calculus or not slip an extra sleeve of Oreos under your shirt when the Kwik-E-Mart security guard isn’t looking. They get taught. She just needs someone to show her the ropes.  
  
__She thinks that this man sitting behind the desk, his face creased in polite bemusement, can show her. She flew eight thousand miles on that hope, on the way her heart quickened at his conviction in some kind of vast and innate goodness in the universe. And maybe she could put her pounding heartbeat down to her previous taste for too many Red Bulls, or maybe the weird bartender had slipped something into those free drinks, but the little voice in her head is telling her that it’s something else. Something bigger. Something that’s meant to be. She won’t have to do this on her own.  
  
__She smiles at him, biting her lip, hope and fear and anticipation swelling her chest near to bursting.  
  
__“Great. Hi. My name is Eleanor Shellstrop. Can we talk?”_

 

**Author's Note:**

> this started with the line "do you really want to remember all the times he didn't?", was supposed to be a real quick one shot of that scene alone, and is now brought to you by the question "why didn't I write nine thousand words of my dissertation instead?"
> 
> this stupid show has ruined me, and I clearly have way more feelings / angst / hangups about their memories being wiped 802 times than the actual characters do. like, a LOT of feelings and a LOT of angst. there's so MUCH they'll never know how are they all so okay with it?!? I'M NOT OKAY WITH IT.
> 
> endless shrampies with all the assorted sauces for [kasuchi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kasuchi), who is a fabulous beta/editor, and who listened to me yell about a lot of these feelings over whatsapp and never once left me on read. hopefully the structure is semi-coherent: regular text is a post-2x12 chronological timeline, italics are vaguely reverse-chronological flashbacks. st john's university is not real. ibises aka bin chickens are, unfortunately, extremely real.


End file.
